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In the ensuing months, Varenik talked with CIA agents at hotels and later at a CIA safe house. If he wanted to meet, he would make a chalk mark on a utility pole that was on his route home from the TASS office. The CIA paid him $3,000 a month. He also received small gifts-a German encyclopedia, for example. He was prolific: his reports fill four drawers in a CIA safe. He described "false flag" operations in which KGB agents recruited Germans while pretending to be South Africans or Israelis.
Of particular interest to CIA officials were his revelations about an operation called Ryan, the KGB's efforts to set up a system to determine if the Americans were drawing up plans for a surprise nuclear strike. One of Varenik's tasks was to recruit agents near NATO airfields who could report if the number of flights increased suddenly. Varenik also told the CIA about the KGB's areas of keen interest--NATO weaponry, especially aircraft, for example, and computers and data handling.
At Varenik's last meeting with the cia, everything seemed normal. He had recently returned from home leave in Moscow, and there were no signs of trouble. But two days later, he was recalled, ostensibly to discuss a new assignment. Four days after that, his wife Raisa and their two children were hustled out of Bonn after being told that they were being given a new apartment in Moscow. En route to the airport, Raisa realized she'd forgotten her passport. When she returned to the apartment, she saw that it had been ransacked by the kgb. Varenik didn't have time to alert the CIA before he left, and the first the Americans knew of trouble was when he missed the next scheduled meeting. The CIA had given Varenik secret writing materials and a Moscow emergency telephone number. He never used them. It is claimed that he confessed all at his trial.
Almost 10 years later, his wife, who never knew of Varenik's contacts with the Americans, still doesn't believe he was a double agent. "My husband was a man of crystal clarity who loved his country passionately," she says. "He was absolutely incapable of committing any treachery against his family and homeland." Like Aldrich Ames, he was capable of such things. Unlike his betrayer Aldrich Ames, he paid for it with his life.
-With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow